Distil Networks CEO Rami Essaid. Portrait by Erick Gibson
Distil Neworks
Distil Neworks CEO Rami Essaid admits that he and his founding partners were “all nerds” early on. He met chief technology officer Engin Akyol when they skipped lunch in seventh grade to play chess in their hometown of Cary, North Carolina.
Essaid later dropped out of college to start a mobile phone retailer called Chit Chat Communications. After selling that venture, he tinkered with a few other startup ideas and worked for other firms before launching Distil Networks in 2011 with Akyol and another childhood friend, Andrew Stein. The three were spread out in three separate areas—North Carolina, California and the D.C. area—when they saw a need for a cyberterrorism firm that defends companies against automated attacks.
Arlington County turned out to be the common ground for their startup, which has since grown to 150 employees and raised $65 million in capital, with blue-chip customers such as Staples, eBay and StubHub.
What Distil offers is protection against “bots”—software programs that use automation to try out various password and user-name combinations to break into and steal from online accounts, scrape proprietary data from competitors or send spam.
When Essaid and his colleagues first began their quest for funding, skeptics couldn’t foresee the need for an entire company whose mission was to fight bots.
Now bots make up 46 percent of all web traffic, according to Distil, and fighting them is an entire market. “The problem is getting worse,” Essaid says. “We’re seeing more attacks and higher sophistication of attacks.”
Distil uses big data to stop attacks, sifting through hundreds of pieces of information about every computer accessing a client’s website—for instance, how many languages it has installed—to figure out a “fingerprint” for that computer. In instances where a computer is suspected of being run by a bot rather than a human, safeguards such as “CAPTCHA” images (wavy words or phrases that only humans can decipher) can be put in place to reduce the likelihood of a breach, Essaid explains.
Now, with hundreds of clients on its roster, Distil is expanding into protecting mobile devices, recognizing that hackers who are locked out of the front door of a company website will often try to sneak in the back window.
Sean Mallon, associate vice president for entrepreneurship and innovation at George Mason University, says Arlington is in a unique position to capitalize on its proximity to the Pentagon as the entire cyberterrorism sector expands. Distil, he says, could easily grow into a $1 billion company that spawns other growth.
Things haven’t always been smooth sailing for Distil, so-named for its mission of removing digital impurities. The company got off to a rocky start when Essaid was sued by a previous employer (who claimed the young entrepreneur had come up with the idea for Distil while working for them). But with that suit settled, Distil is poised to take off. Hackers are endlessly inventive, Essaid says, and keeping up with them is an ongoing evolution.
“If you’re trying to keep up with the bad guys, you need to change every day,” he says.
Although he and his partners do enjoy an occasional throwback to their roots. They just ordered a chess set for the office.